


Once Upon a Dream

by DarthFucamus



Category: The Boy (2016 Bell)
Genre: Body Hair, Brahms is a Garbage Boy Stink Man, Exhibitionism, F/M, Face-Sitting, Femdom, Masks, Masturbation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Porn With Plot, Sleep Groping, Sleepiness, Sleeping Pills, Sweat, Watching Someone Sleep, Wet Dream, the mask stays on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 15:03:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15415593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthFucamus/pseuds/DarthFucamus
Summary: Amelia has a little over a month to prepare Heelshire manor for an upcoming fundraising gala. Not only is the venerable but deteriorating manor’s future at stake, but her own professional future. Sleep-deprived but determined, nothing, not even the strange man who visits her dreams, will stop her from seeing the job through...





	Once Upon a Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WorldsFool](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorldsFool/gifts).



> worldsfool said:  
> “Ask you shall receive. The Brahms house is abandoned but the ghost of the fabled son still lives in its walls. A squatter is on the run from an abusive life and now homeless, seeing a perfectly sized house for sale (and has been for a while <<) she hunkers in to wait out what the radio says is a big storm. Can't be too picky when it comes to shelter, even if this house does seem to be 'haunted.'”
> 
> Anonymous said:  
> “So... a little birdie told me you might be working on a Brahmsey fic. the birdie also wrote a dirty boy fic and there were mask kisses and i need to see how brahms would react to a girl riding his face mask... grind hump hump grind Sorry. I have a need and I can’t write for the life of me!!!”
> 
> I've been trying to write a fic for The Boy for awhile, now, but for whatever reason couldn't get it to work to my satisfaction. However, I'm so glad I opened up my ask box to reqs and suggestions because it gave me an excuse to just do it. So, Thank you both for your suggestions. To Worldsfool, I hope you don't mind if I diverged from your original suggestion a bit, but I was still inspired! Thanks :) I hope you enjoy

 

* * *

###  **1.**

“Tell me about the man,” Dr. Rush said from the wingback chair by the window. Amelia looked past him to the city traffic outside and below. It was easier to be honest if she avoided looking at her therapist, a portly but refined man about the same age as her father.

“He’s… tall. I don’t always see him directly, sometimes he’s just looming in the corner of my eye.”

“You said ‘looming.’ Is his presence threatening?”

Amelia zoned out with her eyes on a double-decker full of tourists on the street below. Nothing seemed so dire here in the bright, bustling world of central London.

“No. I don’t feel threatened by him. More… intrigued.”

“How is your romantic life, lately? I remember you said a couple sessions ago that you’re interested, but you’ve been too preoccupied with work.”

Amelia snorted. It didn’t bother her that he’d asked a personal question like that, but it did bother her that it was his first response to her dreams about a strange man in the bedroom.

“Look, I just don’t have time to think about it right now. It’s not a problem, though. I’m busy and happy, and I’ll have plenty of time to worry about that after-”

“After the fundraising charity gala,” Dr. Rush said, looking at his notes a few pages back. “At the end of the month.”

“Yep. I’m definitely going to, you know, put myself out there. Once things calm down. It’s not that long. And until then,” Amelia said, forcing nonchalance, “I can handle my own needs.”

“Of course, I understand,” he said with a mild, nonjudgmental smile. “Tell me more about this recurring dream.”

She drank her coffee and nodded, happy to move on.

“I’ve spoken to him a couple of times. He calls himself Brahms, which is kind of sick if you think about it... I can’t remember exactly what I said, or he said, but his voice is always this… soft-spoken falsetto. It sounds funny when I say it out loud, I know. But it’s hard to describe. It’s like… he’s imitating a little boy, and it’s very convincing. And, before you ask, I have a great relationship with all the men in my family. And you already know my feelings about children.”

“Of course. We’ve been working together for a couple of months now, I hope you know I am not here to judge you. Dreams are an unconscious collection of the thoughts, feelings, and memories of our time awake. They aren’t necessarily meant to be taken literally, though sometimes the information is presented that way.”

Amelia nodded, feeling somewhat better.

“I won’t lie, the dreams are almost… sexual. He never comes close to me, but he watches so intently it’s almost like he’s touching me. Like it’s only a matter of time before he actually does,” Amelia said, feeling warm under her collar. “And… his expression is always the same: blank. Like a statue’s.”

“Do you feel aroused knowing that he is watching you?” Dr. Rush asked with almost bored detachment. Amelia shifted in her seat uncomfortably.

“Yes. And...” She’d almost told him about the masturbatory turn these dreams had begun to take, but she wasn’t quite ready to have her dream self’s latent voyeuristic tendencies brought out into the open. “So is he. I… can tell by the way he breathes. And stares at me. Like I’m the only thing that matters.”

Dr. Rush wrote something down, and she decided to change the topic, flushed warmer after the admission. It sounded so conceited when she said it aloud.

“Like I said, I don’t remember all he says, but the way he acts and talks… it’s almost like… he lives there or something. And knows about my work, like he’s been watching me the whole time.”

“It’s simple. The man knows because _you_ know. Consider this: this man is a manifestation of your feelings, perhaps the pressures of performing at work, of staying in an old house alone at night, He may also represent other priorities that have been set aside while you focus on your work. You would know better than anyone, but it calls to my mind a fear that, despite all your hard work, you’ll never see the payoff you want.”

Amelia nodded thoughtfully as she considered it. It all made sense when he put it that way, and when delivered with his benevolent, fatherly smile.

“Time’s almost up, but I have one final bit of advice for you: get some sleep, Amelia. Do whatever it takes, bring some comforts from home, a favorite pillow or blanket, music, or whatever. Do what you have to do to get an adequate amount of rest because sleep is vital to your emotional health. With everything going on in your life right now, it’s no wonder you’ve been so tired. Do that for me, yeah? And I’d like to hear all about it when I see you next on Tuesday.”

Amelia left his office better already. She went home to pack for the long drive to the Northern country ahead of her. Already her mind had moved on to this weekend’s work schedule, and all that was left to do before the manor was a suitable place to host a fundraiser.

It was only the most significant opportunity she’d had to prove her mettle at the firm. No big deal, though her nonstop schedule was starting to get to her. Just a couple more weeks and she’d be done with the double-duty and the hours of driving back and forth from London to Northumbria.

Tonight when she returned to the Heelshire property, she’d follow Dr. Rush’s advice to ensure that she was ready bright and early tomorrow morning.

She _could_ do this. She knew it, her boss knew it if he gave her the chance to oversee it, but she had to prove it. To herself as much as anyone.

\-----

Amelia woke in the third-floor guest bed to the swirling galaxy night light painting the interior of the room in spangles of slow-moving, colored light.

Her first thought was the Ambien had worn off too early. But when she tried to move, it was as though her limbs were weighted down. Or like she was partially submerged in warm, heavy mud.

It took too much effort, so she lay there, watching the ceiling with hazy thoughts drifting in her head. She recognized that she was asleep by the way her bed rocked gently underneath her like a raft on a gentle river current.

She was almost relieved to know this was a dream. It meant she might get some rest this weekend.

The window rattled, the room creaked, and shifting motes of light swirled over the molded wooden wall panels, and in her hazy dream lucidity, she was floating weightless in a starry void. She willed the strangely realistic experience to move on to more fantastical settings.

It almost worked when she closed her ‘eyes,’ except the sounds were sharp enough to keep her persistently aware of her surroundings. She wasn’t going anywhere.

The creaking of stressed floorboards was similar to any other sounds of the house, except it had come from inside the room, this time. A reflexive thrill roiled through her like a slow brushfire of nerves and excitement. The tightness in her belly was an involuntary reaction to knowing that someone was in the room with her. And not just anyone, but _him_.

The Ambien dream state made her both sluggish and calm, and overly aware. This was the kind of thing that was so vivid during but always faded in the morning. She really wanted to remember.

She forced her eyes to move toward the man in the corner. His figure was visible when the moving lights swirled over him, the same long body, the same dark mess of hair framing his stony, doe-eyed face.

She didn’t know what kind of manifestation he was, or what her subconscious mind was trying to express by making him appear, but Amelia could feel the subtle ache between her legs. Lacking her usual conscious restraint, she made a soft noise of discomfort. She breathed and, with her body sinking into the soft bed, tried to gather the energy to speak.

“I’m so glad it’s always just you,” she mumbled on her second attempt to conjure words. She pulled air into her sluggish lungs and smiled to the specter in the corner. “And not some... monster.”

The swirling projected space cloud passed over him, illuminating his curious head tilt as he looked around the room.

“Pretty lights,” he said in his soft, childlike voice. Amelia tried stretching her back to relieve the tension growing in her while under his dark gaze. So irritatingly real, yet she wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning.

“Yeah. Are you going to come over here and fuck me tonight?” she asked through half-closed eyes as her body was gently rocked by the shifting earth.

“Don’t say things like that,” the man said, and his voice was closer this time. Amelia met his doleful stare at the foot of her bed, his face illuminated by indirect swirling lights, passing over her front. He was so tall, so ragged. So like the little porcelain doll sitting on the chair. All of these details, she knew, her brain had gathered during the day to add depth to the fantasy.

“Sorry,” she said with a slurred giggle, even though she wanted to repeat it, or something cruder. She worried, with dulled anxiety, that the vividness of this dream meant waking up tired like every other night she’d spent here in the last three weekends.

“I’m happy you came back,” he said, his long arms and knobby hands dangling at his sides. “Even if you’re poking around in my stuff.”

“I don’t _want_ your stuff, you know,” she said with a sigh. Her hands both snaked under the covers, and she looked back to the lights on her ceiling. “I have my own flat full of _my_ stuff.”

Her fingertips dug under the elastic waistband of her silk sleep shorts, tongue pinched between her lips as she looked for some self-indulgence.

She let loose a contented sigh, thrilled to find that her nerves were as sensitive as it always was in these dreams. Since her dream man didn’t want to fuck her, she’d just have to take care of it herself. The pleasant, tingling heat built quickly, and soon the churning of her fingers over wet flesh was audible.

It wasn’t long before she heard something else, too. Heavy breathing rose from the foot of her bed.

“You still there?” she asked, her wrist working beneath the covers.

She shifted and sighed, stretching her neck back, tweaking and waking her wet, aroused nerves until they almost buzzed under her hand.

The man didn’t answer, and she peered at his shape, trying to figure him out. He was nothing but a dark, hunched outline when the rotating lights didn’t land on him. He breathed, ragged and trapped. Like his stone face had a second, hidden mouth.

“You want to see?” she asked, playing the shameless tease.

A nebulous swirl of lights rolled over his nodding visage, and her mouth stretched into a lazy smile. _Good boy_ , she thought, closing her eyes, and because it was a dream, she only had to will the covers to remove themselves and they politely complied, sliding down past her ankles.

She still felt so hot, tangled in her sleep shorts. She kicked them off too and expelled her breath like a slowly deflating balloon as her heated skin cooled in the open air. With her legs wide, she began touching herself again, only half aware of anything outside of that sensation. This was exciting, she’d never gotten this far. She wanted to get off this time.

“It doesn’t make any sense that you’re here,” Amelia sighed, stroking her clit and biting her lip. “You’re not real. You’re my pent-up desire. Or my need to be loved. Or something.”

Her little joke gave her a bit of a chuckle, but he didn’t laugh.

“It’s my house,” he said, petulant and crouched like a gargoyle at the foot of her mattress. “These are _my_ things.”

He was on the bed now, she realized, in the space between her ankles, and a shameless thrill rose in her chest. Here, the moving night light was at his back, and his front was in shadow. She breathed in throaty sighs, watching him through cracked lids, occasionally blinded by the sweeping lights his shape didn’t block.

“We’re just trying to help,” she said with a hitched breath.

The bed was tipping again, this time toward him. In her mind, his dark silhouette became a black hole, flat and lightless, a consumptive nothingness in the shape of a man. As though by gravity, the darkness creeping between her legs seemed to pull her toward it.

It was inescapable, and Amelia pumped three fingers into her wet opening, stretching it while her other hand worked over her clit

“Please, just fuck me already,” she groaned to him, frustrated, sliding her legs apart to invite the darkness in.

Amelia was suddenly awake.

A noise had brought her out of it. Or had she spoken aloud in her sleep? She didn’t know how much time had passed.

Through bleary eyes, she observed the bedroom drenched in the golden morning light as the faint ghost of her galaxy projection still moved in shadow.

Morning. The long, restless night was over.

She yawned and stretched and grumbled, tired. There was a dense ache between her legs, and she went to scratch, only to find that she was naked from the waist down under the covers and thoroughly drenched.

She couldn’t quite remember what she’d dreamt about. Except for a face, expressionless and unchanging everywhere but the eyes.

She was awake now, though, and the sleep fog retreated quicker than usual thanks to the gorgeous day peeking in through the window. She just needed to put on a pot of tea, and she’d be ready to get started.

The first thing she saw when she sat up was the doll in the chair by the closet. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching her as she hunted down fresh underwear, baffled as to where her last pair had gone to.

 

* * *

**2.**

Amelia fought distraction all day, and coffee did little to help. She couldn’t understand why, after all of her efforts, she still wasn’t sleeping well.

The time the workers finished for the night, and she’d finished a quick meal, she had trouble quieting her mind enough to sleep.

Even with the galaxy night light and soft new age music playing on a timer, the emptiness of her room, and the hallways, and the whole house, in fact, seemed to stretch around her.

She thought about Dr. Rush’s mention of her love life and felt the same twist of stress in her chest she always did, just considering all the work it’d take to actually do something about it. She just didn’t have time for it now. She’d have to update her dating profile online, and then tag along with her friends all tarted up like a petit four, all on the hopes that some guy would fuck her, or maybe even, dare she hope, _like_ her.

Only to leave her when he couldn’t handle her drive and independence.

She let out a blustering breath and stared up at the lights migrating over the interior of the guest bedroom. The Ambien hadn’t entirely kicked in yet, but she could feel it softening the edges of the room. Alone again, her thoughts returned to the dreams and her frustrations.

She made an attempt to get herself off, to see if it would help her sleep. Before she could make much progress, though, she drifted off with her hand still pinched between her thighs.

She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until she became aware of the man at the end of her bed as if he’d already been there. Her dream dulled her surprise, as if it were being filtered through layers of cotton batting, distant and impersonal.

“I don’t want your treasure, Brahms,” she mumbled, rolling over, wanting to go back into deeper sleep.

“This is my house,” he said, and Amelia groaned. Her subconscious was unable to create a new dream, it seemed, and was caught on reruns.

“Don’t worry, I can’t afford it. You can have it back when I’m done,” Amelia said with her face mashed into the pillow.

“Mum and Dad are dead,” he continued. “Everything in it belongs to me, now.”

Something about the way he said it sent a chill down her arms. When she next looked, he wasn’t at the foot of her bed anymore. He was next to it, looking down at her with the luminous, color-shifting light dancing over what it could reach.

“Everything?”

Amelia rolled onto her back, heavy and languid, hovering in the state between wanting to sink deeper and wanting this reverie to end so she could see daylight again. He didn’t answer, but his dark, moist stare was answer enough. She saw the face it was set in more clearly than she had before.

A statue painted to look like a man with good health. Lifeless except for the eyes.

She uttered a low-energy, oozy laugh.

“ _I’m_ in your house,” she pointed out, hands going beneath her covers. The way this man looked at her… it sent shivers down her spine that pooled heavily in her lower back.

The light highlighted him, made him seem incorporeal as his hand crept down to the front of his ratty, dark trousers.

“Yes,” she said, watching her dream man touch himself with a sigh when her fingers found her slit. “Finally.”

She wasn’t wet, but a quick wad of spit would help that, and she nudged the covers aside when she brought the saliva between her legs. The man, leaning above her exposed body, made a strained throat sound that sent a spike of fear through her dreamy haze.

She let her eyes move down to where a sizable, knobby-knuckled hand massaged his fly and focused on that rather than the unnerving, expressionless face above.

“Let me see it,” she said, stroking uninhibited sleep-arousal into her own pussy. She’d get fucked in this dream, or she’d wake up now from sheer frustration. “It’s only fair.”

Muffled, raspy breaths came from that stony face hovering over her, but all she cared about were the hands undoing his trouser button and zipper.

“Good boy,” she mumbled, slipping some fingers into her opening, her skin gliding easier. His hand tucked into his trousers. From the open fly, he unfurled an unnecessarily big cock, and he held its soft shape like he was about to put out a fire with it. No underwear.

“Or, maybe you’re a _bad_ boy?” she amended with a smile, gratified by his low rumbling growl in answer.

“Sometimes I’m naughty,” he said, breathless and in a lower register. The slow-moving galaxy night light passed across the hardening organ in his hand, and Amelia was genuinely amazed what her brain had conjured, only to taunt her with not fulfilling her desires. Why couldn’t this be one of those dreams she had some control over?

“Tell me everything,” Amelia sighed, licking her lips and watching him knead the half-hard horse cock that hung near eye level.

“Greta took the medicine too,” he said, rolling his long fingers over the pale shaft lazily as projected stars slowly wheeled. “It kept her from waking up.”

Amelia paused. _That_ was a disturbing turn. And where had she heard that name before? She felt her emotions flip without gradual transition as they tended to do in dreams, and her hand faltered and cupped over her cunt.

“What did you do to her?” Amelia asked, frightened of the placid-faced creature touching himself over her bed.

“Only watched,” he said, head tilting beneath its mop-like mess of curls, and her fear receded just as quickly as it had come. “I was good for her. I’ll be better for you.”

The shaft he kneaded had grown in size and now stood out from his body like a post, its glistening head peeking through the sliding foreskin as he stroked without an apparent goal.

“Maybe I don’t want ‘good,’” she said, watching it and swallowing her spit. Her fingers began moving again, rolling and kneading the moist ache away. “Maybe that’s why my brain made you.”

Only half paying attention to him, she was startled by how much nearer he’d come. A hand, long-fingered, slid onto the corner of her bed and she could even hear the wet sound of skin sliding over taut skin as he masturbated that absurd organ of his. So vivid.

She reached for his face, but he shied back out of reach. With a grunt of frustration, she dragged her hand down over his collarbones and upper chest, complete with a beastly amount of body hair, to the overstretched singlet he wore. His chest was hard under the dirty white fabric and heaving.

Her fingers found something to hold onto, one of the thick elastic straps of a pair of black suspenders. She let go of her pussy to grab the other strap with wet fingers, and the man groaned as he strained his face to smell them.

She tugged him forward, and the next moment he was on the bed, crawling over her prone body.

“C’mon big boy,” she said with a leer, grasping at him anywhere she could hold, in fistfuls of loose-knit jumper, gripping the hard side of his waist underneath the cardigan, too late to realize that by _God_ , he smelled. Like sweat and soot and unwashed male body odor, and suddenly Amelia felt like she couldn’t breathe under him.

“I’m a good boy,” he said in a soft, breathy voice, scraping chewed nails over her face. “I’m a good, big boy.”

He breathed in ragged gasps while straddling her body, and his fist jerked over his massive cock. The hard round head tapped her squirming belly with a wet smear. Amelia whimpered in fright, now shoving him off of her by the clothes she’d used as a handle a moment before, but he was immovable. He panted and let escape a few helpless moans, and his cock jabbed into her bare belly like he was trying to fuck it.

Amelia’s heart raced, and she wasn’t sure if her body was disobeying her wishes or if she _wanted_ this man to ravish her. Her mind leapt back and forth between the two as his face mashed into hers, the hard tip of his aquiline nose and cherubic lips sinking into her cheeks and lips and chin with the coarse scrape of unglazed bisque.

A mask, she realized, the intruder was wearing a mask, and growling and panting like an animal as he pressed her into the bed with his sliding feet and jerking hips.

Amelia screamed, and the body on top of her scrambled back. He released his cock so that it bobbed between his lanky, bent legs. Backlit by the galaxy light, he was a shadow again, arms poised mid-flight. And with the creak of old bed springs, he was gone.

Amelia lay there, panting, as the room swam around her. Her center of gravity wobbled, and the slow-moving lights weren’t helping. His smell lingered in her nose, but like the panic she’d felt at his presence, it faded. A nightmare, but she’d escaped. Upon knowing that, she felt calm and tired within her dream.

And so fucking frustrated she could cry.

 

* * *

**3.**

Sunday morning came, sunny and bright. She didn’t understand why she felt so tired and  jumpy. Distraction came far too easily, her thoughts drifting all over the place without satisfaction.

She catalogued the contents of a second-floor study almost twice to completion before she realized it. Progress was slow, but she tried to maintain a professional composure when speaking directly to the others.

Even so, the fourth time someone told her she looked tired, she let slip a cutting remark about how a man would never be told such a thing in her place. The worker, a young guy hired to buff and wax the wooden floors, turned pasty white in some places and blotchy red in others and hurried off to some very important task or other.

No one bothered her for the rest of the day, and she could assume that word of her mood had spread among them and felt a bit guilty about it. The solitude was beneficial to her concentration, but Amelia couldn’t help feeling guilty for her short fuse. She was usually more diplomatic, but her nerves were frayed worse than ever.

Even after a few cups of coffee, she found herself giving a start at every noise, her hands moving to the unsettling scatter of little bruises on her neck and cheeks. They were sore, almost itchy under her skin, and it was difficult keep her fingers off them. They reminded her of some transient memory or emotion she couldn’t name.

Touching them made her blush, made her want to prod them harder.

It was almost shameful. How would it look when she showed up to work on Tuesday speckled with mysterious bruises? Tomorrow was a bank holiday. She decided she would treat herself to some facial masks and pampering. She certainly deserved it with everything currently riding on her shoulders.

But as the day wore on, and Amelia’s to-do list didn’t seem to shrink any, her hopes of waking up in the morning in her own bed faded. It was pushing six o clock before the workers called it quits for the day.

Amelia wished them a good evening and week, and after a quick meal, prepared to stay for one more night.

After all, there was just next weekend, and then the fundraiser was the following saturday. This way, she could keep working until late, go to sleep when she was tired, and then make the long drive back first thing in the morning.

It was fine. Amelia could handle it. Just two more weeks and she could sleep again.

\-------

Amelia started nodding off after eleven yet she didn’t let it stop her until she was satisfied with her progress. She ended up falling asleep with her head under a curio cabinet.

When she woke, she almost hit her head on the underside. Faint light leaked under the edge from the lamp she’d left on earlier. The house was silent. Even the ever-present wind outside the dark windows was still.

As she got her bearings, the echo of a memory of a noise, the one that had woken her, came back to her. It didn’t make any sense, though, the sound she thought she might have heard. Like a voice, or a cough.

She didn’t know, but it did make her suddenly aware of the stiffness in her neck and shoulders from the awkward position.

She crawled out from under the curio, glad that no one else had been around to see that, and set about her nighttime routine with no time wasted.

Despite relying upon sleep aids for a couple of nights, no sooner did she hit the pillow than she was asleep.

Yet she woke, as she so often had before, in the middle of the night.

It took her a moment of clearing the cobwebs from her brain to recognize what she was looking at. She was on her side, facing the left wall and the closet door. Shifting red and green light shone over the contents, visible because the door was wide open. Just as she _hadn’t_ left it.

Her fear was too acute, too sharp, to be dreaming.

She was awake. She lay there, connecting the sequence of events to explain her mental clarity before she remembered that she had chosen not to take her Ambien before bed, in case her bruises had been a side effect of some kind.

She lay there awake and alert, listening to the soft, subtle noises of breathing behind her.

Her head reeled, and though reclining, she felt herself overcome by faintness. She might have lost consciousness for a moment, it was hard to tell except the sudden change in the positions of the projected cosmos.

And the mattress had shifted. Her body was leaning slightly back, now, as though a second body’s weight had joined her on the bed.

The breathing was so much nearer, now. The smell of sweat mingled with her calming pillow spray.

He was _here_ , and he was laying right behind her. She could scarcely breathe, let alone speak, but she tried anyway, even if it meant whispering.

“Hello.”

She wondered if it had been audible. She was fully conscious, but none of this felt real.

“You stayed over again,” came the response, whispered, behind her. “With me.”

Its source placed his head somewhere around the nape of her neck. One might think a child had spoken and lay behind her, except she could feel the entire length of him weighing on the blanket well past her own feet. The incongruity was jarring.

 _He is real_ , she screamed silently. She pinched her thigh under the covers and felt it.

Awake.

A man was in her bed. She was alone in the middle of the night, in the Middle of Nowhere, Northumbria, without a lifeline. His last comment hung in the air.

Did he think that she was talking in her sleep?

The familiarity of it was dizzying, but the fogginess of _why_ this was so familiar nagged at her. She was chilled. All the blood had retreated from her feet and hands. She shifted, and the slight friction of her thighs against her groin was all it took for an insistent throb to remind her of one memory in particular that presented itself with painful clarity.

He’d seen her masturbate.

None of it had been a dream. She’d fucked herself in front of a stranger, in a state of half-consciousness. It felt like a violation… but oddly freeing. Whatever had transpired between them, whatever he assumed might continue this night, had already begun.

His weight shifted on the bed, closer, and it wasn’t until she heard calloused fingers fumbling with a button fly that she realized what he was doing. She was disgusted, both with him and with herself for finding the idea of someone tossing off thinking about her so thrilling.

“Brahms,” she said, using the name he gave her in their first ‘dream’ meeting. “Come closer to me.”

She reached behind her for what she hoped was his arm. What she found was an elbow, a bare elbow. Wiry muscles stood out on the forearm as it froze in place under her hold. He wasn’t wearing a sweater this time.

“Okay,” he said. Amelia’s nerves were on edge as she heard him move. A hand brushed her back, bare knuckles between her shoulder blades, as he took the edge of her covers and tugged them down. Exposed to cool air, gooseflesh erupted over her back and arms, and a sharp ache between her thighs made her gasp.

Would he ravish her?

The thought made blood rush to her face as a tremor of fear wracked her belly.  Worse… did she _want_ him to?

He adjusted his position so that his front met her back and curved against the bends in her knees with his knees, and the cover no longer between them.

No, of _course_ she didn’t want him to assault her.

But as the tickle of moisture seeped between her legs and the flesh grew hot and tight, she couldn’t deny that she wanted _something_ from him. She had an image in her mind, of a pillar of white flesh, gripped in a knobby fist. Were the dimensions of said phallus a product of her repressed desire, too, or as real as the rest of him was now? As real as the very real way he inundated her senses with his oppressive presence?

A solid and shaky hand snaked over her hip from behind, glided over her belly through the silk of her sleeveless nightshirt, his warmth soaking into the material down to her skin beneath.

His hand was uncertain but still bold, as if he were prepared for resistance he didn’t expect would come. _He’s done this before,_ she realized with a cold tremor in her gut. _Or at least has come close to it._

He swallowed a groan, and his breath whistled at the back of her head. After laying this close to him for this long, the total effect of his physical presence made her head swim. His hand crept up her front, bold and testing her boundaries.

With the subtle nudge of his lower body against her bum, as though trying to rub his groin on her, she couldn’t feign drowsy acquiescence any longer.

She rolled away from him with a nervous giggle, hoping to diffuse the tension.

“You stink, you filthy man,” she said, sitting up before he managed to do more, and pushing him onto his back with her hands on his shoulders.

He gripped her wrists with sooty hands, and the galaxy light passed over her back, skimming the edges of his mop of dark hair and the white ceramic. Could he feel the way he made her pulse race beneath his hold? She slid her groin over his hip bones, skating over the bulge in the front of his slacks. If he thought her asleep and compliant before, there was little room to doubt her cognizance now.

“You’ve come to me every night since I arrived,” she said to the faint shape of a face, the black borehole eyes. “Why?”

His hands slid from her wrists up her bare arms, breathing raggedly behind his false face.

“You’re mine,” he said, sweetly. Amelia’s pussy throbbed reflexively at the husky tone and sexual implications. His hips shifted beneath her body, nudging her groin with his trapped erection.

“No, I’m not,” she said, out of breath as his large hands spanned over her shoulders to the straps of her silk sleep shirt. His palms were calloused, and his fingers trembled as they touched her. “I don’t belong to you.”

“You’re in my house,” he said, continuing the casual, unassuming line of conversation. “I can do whatever I want.”

Amelia’s heart battered against her ribs, and she curled her fingers around his bare shoulders, nails sinking into his hirsute skin.

“And what do you want to do with me?” she asked, dizzied by the nervous excitement speaking those words aloud inspired in her. Brahms groped down either side of her ribs, fingers probing along seams to find bare skin, and when they got to her waist, he grasped where her soft shape curved inward and jerked her body down against his. Exhilarated, she gasped, and her lips twitched in a nervous smile.

“Kiss,” he said, his voice breaking. “A kiss goodnight.”

“Just a kiss?” she asked, out of breath. The galaxy lights tilted her sense of equilibrium. A tiny shift in her posture to adjust created friction where their groins touched and triggered Brahms to toss his hips up against her.

She could almost make out his silent nod. She slid her thumbs under the suspender straps on his shoulders and held on.

“Wouldn’t you like something more?” she asked, licking her lips. The body beneath her tensed and squirmed, and without meaning to, she nudged his bulge against her panty-clad crotch. The fabric slipped into the slick between her cunt lips, grazing the sensitive flesh.

“I… I want to put it inside,” he said in a strained whisper. She uttered a hard laugh, even as her belly flipped at the thought.

“Not the way you smell,” she said, pulling back against his hands on her waist. They slid down to her hips and squeezed into the meat of them. Amelia inspected her silk sleep shirt. Even in the low light, there were visible fingerprints on the soft, glossy fabric. “You need a bath.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and she felt a twinge of guilt. Who knew what he’d been through that had gotten him to this state?

“It’s no matter. We can worry about that later. But for now…” she said, undulating her hips, grinding hard on the ridge of his trapped cock, protected from direct contact by her sleep shorts. “There are other things we can do. And... something you can help me with.”

Brahms groaned beneath her, head tossing back against the pillow. His feet pushed against the cover as he tried to brace against her body from beneath, and Amelia dragged her hands down his torso beneath the suspender straps. He seemed to want to be compliant, and an alien sort of titillation took hold of her.

He flinched when she tried to touch his stomach, and she registered the hard lump underneath the white fabric of his singlet as scar tissue. Curious, she would have to learn more later, perhaps by the light of day. She went to his trouser waist and slowly tugged the bottom of his singlet up, exposing the dark-haired stomach, concave enough to suggest malnourishment.

Brahms was holding her hips in place as he fidgeted beneath her sliding crotch, desperate for more pressure when her own weight wasn’t enough.

His lust was exhilarating. There was no guessing what he wanted, no coy games. Just shameless desire. That, plus the sensation of riding him, was enough to bring her arousal close to the surface.

Tingling, jittering nerve endings throbbed for more sensation. She could almost pretend she was doing this in her sleep. It was easier, that way, and believable. As she sought to gratify herself in this crude way, she was met by the distinct sense of deja vu. Sexual sensations were always heightened in sleep. There was no other explanation for why something as rudimentary as frottage would feel so good.

Of course, it had been so long since she’d thought to get herself off, what with everything. Now, she felt the weight of her pent up desire sitting on her lower spine. And with his animalistic noises and desperate whimpers, and his rough grip as he mashed her down against him, Amelia thought she might cum.

The body under her bucked, lifting her into the air, anchored against him as his erection pulsed through the layers of fabric. Wet warmth soaked into his trousers against the seam of her groin and inner thigh and Brahms groaned long and deep.

“Oh goddammit,” Amelia growled to herself, moving to get off of him and away from his quickly cooling jizz. But he didn’t let her go, and his moans of release turned to desperate whimpering.

“Please wait, please,” he said, swallowing mid-plea. “I want to kiss you.”

“You want a kiss, too?” she asked, incredulous. He nodded, still breathing hard enough to make his stomach rise under her hands.

She hadn’t realized they were still there until now, and without thinking scraped her nails through the hair on his abdomen just a little too hard to be considered nice.

“While wearing that?” she asked, looking at the ghostly face beneath her, just pale enough to catch some indirect light. He didn’t answer, and she didn’t know if he understood the question. But she was frustrated and at her breaking point. Sopping wet and unsatisfied, her thoughts took a malicious turn.

“Alright,” she said, reaching to touch the cheek. His face turned to meet the palm of her hand, grazing it with the hard lips and nose. Amelia felt the material. It had been broken at some point, like the doll’s, and had also been repaired with as much care. The material was much more solid feeling than the doll’s head. Thicker.

As light as the material was, by her measure it looked like the cleanest part of him. He wanted a kiss? So did she.

She leaned down and pressed her lips over his and her breasts against his chest as his long arms wrapped around her lower back from both sides. His hold was shaky, though, as if prepared for a sudden turn against his favor. As though he were as nervous as he was eager.

He grunted softly, pushing his face harder against hers, and she remembered how she got the bruises. Even knowing it, she let him do it, and reached between them to where her cunt rested on his abdomen. Her finger stroked the crotch of her silk shorts down the middle and into the crease until the friction of the smooth fabric against her swollen clit was most stimulating.

The sharp, temporary pain of his hard face against hers molded with the heat from below somewhere around her middle, and her frustration turned to anticipation. She uttered a soft moan, scraping her front teeth against the matte bisque and Brahms gave a breathy grunt in answer, his hand sliding down to grip the globe of her arse cheek.

“Ready for your kiss?” she asked him, biting her lip, drunk on the lights and the heightened state she was in, and the high of feeling so in control. Brahms hesitated before nodding, voiceless except for the sound of open-mouthed breaths hitting the inside of his mask.

Amelia dragged herself over him, out of his confused and grasping hands, toward his head. She anchored herself on the headboard, resting for a moment with her pussy against his long neck, feeling the bobbing of his distended adam’s apple against her vulva.

“You stole my panties didn’t you?” she said, looking down at him. He might have been trying to talk, she couldn’t tell, but his hands clawed down her back, chewed nails snagging silk camisole straps. His beard hairs tickled the inside of her upper thighs. She lifted herself up and he sucked in a sharp breath.

“Didn’t you?” she demanded, sharper. He nodded. She couldn’t see, but she felt the bottom edge of the ceramic face tap her mons.

“You knew I was drugged when you came to me, didn’t you?” she asked. She kept one hand on the headboard but the other slid down to her shorts, slipped under the waistband and through her soft, trim pubic hair.

He nodded. Honest, at least.

“You’re naughty. Filthy. Rude,” she said, breathing hard and steady. Her index and middle finger slid through the folds, trapping the nub of her clit. “And now you want a kiss?”

“Please,” he gasped, and Amelia was almost startled that he’d lost the innocent tenor. This was a man, begging her now, grasping loosely at her back and buttocks. “Please pleaseplease. I’ll be good, I will.”

Amelia sucked air through her teeth, pinching her clit between her slippery knuckles, the motion causing those same fingers to jab into his throat uncomfortably. She felt him swallowing compulsively, but he didn’t try to throw her off.

“Time for your kiss,” she said. A surge of excitement filled her and she dragged her hips forward, mashing her groin over his hard face. Brahms uttered a muffled exclamation and his hands squeezed and spread her arse cheeks through her shorts. It wasn’t an attempt to unseat her, either, because it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to do so.

She grinded on his face with no regard to his comfort, well aware that her weight was probably crushing the mask against his nose, if he had one. She tested, adjusting her hips, holding the headboard for balance, until she found the exact right angle that positioned the end of his nose beneath her clit.

It was an inefficient and awkward method, and would have been easier facing the other way, but at this point she was less concerned with getting off than proving to him that he was _not_ in control here.

“You’re not an animal,” she said to him through her teeth, wiping her sweaty forehead on her forearm. “You’re a man, and you will behave as one.”

He might have been saying something, but his voice was so muffled that she could only make out the whiny pitch. His lower body squirmed behind her, shaking the mattress beneath her braced knees.

His head moved beneath her, jabbing her pussy with his nose and she reached behind herself, found his nipple, and pinched it through his singlet. He yelped against her groin.

“Hold still,” she said, not unkindly. “It’s my turn, you understand? It’s _my_ turn, and you will behave for me like you promised.”

She didn’t know who this was that was speaking through her mouth. It was like some combination of her mother and a dominatrix and she felt herself slip into the role as naturally as though she’d always had it in her.

His chest heaved to a nearly concerning degree, and she heard and felt the air whistling around the edges of his mask between her thighs and the soft puffs of air through his nostrils against her panties. She lifted her weight a bit, just enough for him to breathe easier. He nodded, and the movement lightly butted his nose against her crotch in an accidental, but delicious way.

She threaded her fingers through his hair, dragging her nails over his scalp, and gripped tight enough to hold him still. She grinded down on him, rocking her hips enough to nudge his nose against her pussy in long, deliberate strokes.

At first, hearing the way he grunted, deep in his throat with each forward dip and backward skim of her pussy against his mask face, was all she heard. Every helpless masculine growl he made while gripping her ass in his hands, sent hot jolts straight to her cunt, and spreaded like lightning along the nerves of her inner legs.

The physical sensation was barely enough to stimulate her, but everything else factored into her state with far more prominence. It almost surprised her when she had the first throbbing, tingling signs of an impending release.

Brahms all but held her harder against his face, and the sting of his fingertips denting soft flesh heightened her state. She leaned back, no longer holding onto the headboard for balance, but bracing on his jerking hips as she rode his face. She touched herself, too, in ways that he couldn’t, until she was just hovering over him, working her pussy into a heated frenzy to shallow breathing and moans smothered behind bitten lips.

The guttural grunts he made as he sucked in heaving breaths and strained his hips ineffectively toward her hand. He was hard again.

Amelia sucked in a breath when her self-satisfaction met rippling warmth and a slow-burning orgasm that coursed through her body like an unstoppable wave. She gripped the front of his trousers and squeezed the hardness she felt through the already damp fabric, and with a shudder, the man came a second time with a stuttered whine that only prolonged her own pleasure. She gasped through the hot pulses and rode the aftershocks like gentle waves to shore.

Bonelessly, she slid off of him and leaned against the headboard beside him to catch her breath. The sight of him laying out flat, head sunken into the pillow, panting and massaging his still twitching cock, made her laugh.

Or maybe it was the relief that she’d finally gotten some proper fulfillment. And though she fully expected the post-orgasmic regret to set in after the initial muscle-liquifying languor, none came.

She would do it again if she had the chance. Or more. But her mind had started working before even her body did, and had moved on to bigger things.

When Brahms sat up, shifted down the bed some, and then rested his head on her lap, she couldn’t be bothered to stop him. The semen soaking into the front of his trousers didn’t seem to concern him, though she had to be impressed by his refractory period. All he seemed to want now was some physical affection.

And, feeling more right with the world than she had in awhile, she gave in to the impulse to humor him.

“I’m awake now, Brahms,” she said to the comparatively larger figure huddled with his head on her lap. “And things are going to change.”

He nodded, squeezing her knee.

“Thank you, Amy,” he said, using again the name reserved for family and close friends, leading her to wonder if a secret audience had been privy to the various phone calls she’d made from the manor’s landline.

One thing at a time. Her priority now was with finding the least damaging way to respond to this new information, which was not as unbelievable as it perhaps should have been. Things got a little weird in these isolated Northern towns. Throw in the eccentricity of a reclusive, old-wealth family, and the idea of a man hiding in the walls of his family home for the entirety of his adult life became more plausible.

Amelia liked to think of herself as a morally balanced individual. But as she considered the man whose hand tucked into the warm cleft between her thighs as if seeking warmth or comfort, she recognized how subjective the determination was. Accident or not, she now knew about Brahms Heelshire, which placed her in the uncomfortable position of choosing how to go forward.

She stroked the messy mop of curls as she came to terms with the fact that she couldn’t afford to lose this contract. There was now the additional pressure to succeed, knowing that someone inhabited the estate and had done so for most of his life, someone who perhaps knew no other way to live.

Should his existence become known to the local community, and to the world at large, it would create chaos.

It would be bad for her professional life and put this assignment at risk. It might be devastating to the local contractors, whose good will she had been tasked with attaining, that had a more personal perspective on the Heelshire family controversies, and tragedies. And any delay would be bad for the manor itself; the building showed signs of neglect from before the previous owners’ deaths, and should the state of it be allowed to worsen, it might render repairs to the roof and other parts costly beyond affordability, even to the most prestigious historical property charities.

Everything boiled down to a tenuous situation, wherein the success of its outcome relied on the continued public ignorance in regards to Brahms’s existence. In the short term, it was in his best interest. In the long term…

One thing at a time. She felt a yawn coming on, and the slow-motion gaseous movements of her projector’s lights on the walls had an almost hypnotizing effect.

“Are you leaving again?”

She was surprised to hear him say something. She’d thought him asleep, and had prepared herself for the awkward task of getting him off of her.

“Yes. I have to,” she said, watching how his mask shone green in the billowing lights. “But I’ll be coming back again the next weekend, as I have done.”

The hand on her thigh tightened and he pulled in a trembling breath. She thought for a moment that he might grab her and never let her go, and a thrill of fear swelled behind her ribs and spiked to her still-sodden cunt.

“Okay.”

Denied the resistance she’d expected, she let out her breath as she thought of what to say. Guilty pleasure curled her toes at the thought of more of these nighttime trysts. Perhaps after a good scrub-down. She could put off the decision until after the gala. Until then, she needed to know she could rely on his compliance.

Purple nebula and its overlay of faint stars projected onto his statue-like face.

“I want to help you. But I need your help in order to do so.” she said, lightly touching a fading bruise on his bare shoulder. She swatted aside the irrational urge to make him something to eat. He nodded slow, eyes peering straight ahead.

“I’ll do everything you tell me to,” he said and a warm flush rose to her chest. She had hoped, but had not dared to expect him to be so willing.

“Then you will let me do my job, and you won’t interfere with the others. This is important so tell me you understand.”

He rolled onto his back so that his doll-like face peered up at her, distorting the projected lights. Knees dangling over the side of the bed, he kicked them lightly and nodded.

“Good boy,” she said without thinking. She would have to be satisfied, for now. “It’s time for sleep, now.”

Brahms gave a sleepy nod, rubbing the heel of one hand into his eye socket. Without prompting, he sat up and stood.

“Goodnight, Amy,” he said, shuffling toward the open closet. She knew now that she would have to inspect it more closely in the morning and discover his tricks. She wondered where he slept, and if she’d ever learn anything else about him.

She also wondered if she could possibly pull this off and get away with it with her reputation, and sanity, intact.

“Goodnight... Brahms,” she said from the bed. His shape ducked into the closet door, pulling it shut behind him.

She was left alone to contemplate her life, at least until sober sleep claimed her.

\-------

The next morning, Amelia woke bright and early. The memories of the night prior had a foggy, dreamlike quality to them, but she no longer doubted her nocturnal experiences.

She didn’t see him again, nor any sign of his presence except for dirty handprints on her silk sleep clothes and a lingering absence of stress. 

For the first time in weeks, Amelia attended her morning preparations with a relaxed pace. She listened to music as she packed. Anything seemed possible by the light of day, it could work. But she was concerned for the house’s other occupant, wherever he might have been at that moment.

She’d feel less uncomfortable with leaving him alone for another week if she knew he would have something to eat. Amelia threw together some leftover vegetables and other ingredients left from her Friday grocery run. While it cooked in the kitchen’s pressure cooker, she made a last walkthrough of the house to ensure that all the windows were locked against potential bad weather.

In truth, she was looking for him. She wanted to see him with her own eyes in plain light. But as he’d done since the start, Brahms chose to elude her. She touched the sensitive places on her neck and skin where his ‘kisses’ had come too rough. Dull pain sank to her belly when she toyed with them.

An imprint, and a reminder of what was at stake.

“Alright, then,” she called to the empty, sunny kitchen once she’d put the last container of stew into the freezer and the stew pot was mid-wash in the dishwasher. She felt stupid, but less so than she might a week ago. “Don’t forget to eat. And wash up.”

She didn’t know what else to say, and he didn’t answer, so she left, dragging her overnight bags through the side entrance and toward her car. She locked the door behind her, turned over the ignition and tuned the radio to the local classical channel.

As she pulled away, she slowed to a stop in front of the house, scanning the windows as though she might see a face.

There might have been a shadow moving in the kitchen, but she couldn’t be sure. Her last sight of the manor was towering strangely dark despite the rarity of pleasant weather around it.

“See you in a few days,” she said to the shrinking reflection, curious as to the lingering excitement to think of what would be waiting for her when she returned.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! And thank you to those who requested a fic from this story. And, thank you, as ALWAYS to my buddy FancyLadySnackCakes, without whom none of this would have seen the light of day.
> 
> I have a lot more I could write in this fandom, which was why it took me so long to tackle it, probably, but I'll save it for later.  
> Please tip your writer for this free garbage! I accept payment in a kudos or a comment!


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